replacement pending but only because it's costly to repair

In her tidy apartment on the 12th floor of the senior complex at 4500 N. Clarendon Ave., Tsilya Nemanova keeps the air conditioner blowing full blast, but it does little to stave off the summer's record heat.

"I couldn't walk because of the hot air," Nemanova said. "It was very, very hot."

She bought a portable cooler which she placed in her living room, but she said it barely makes a dent.

"Every year we ask about the air conditioner," Nemanova said. "They promise, promise, every year — and nothing."

About 70 of the building's tenants signed a petition that was delivered Tuesday to their alderman, complaining that the air conditioning has not worked properly for years and has performed particularly poorly in recent weeks.

"The majority of the tenants living in the building are elderly and disabled and the temperature has not been below 84 F day and night," the petition states. "We have reported this to our manager many times and the (air conditioning) unit is still unrepaired, and the small fixes only help for a brief time and then the unit stops working again."

Some residents say their concerns have been ignored, in part because they have little clout. Many are immigrants from Russia, Poland and South Korea, and some have difficulty speaking English.

Their rents are subsidized by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development because they cannot afford to pay the market rate.

Bella Rubin, whose parents live in the building, emailed the Problem Solver because her 84-year-old father, Fayvish Dimanshteyn, is recovering from heart surgery and her mother, Polina Dimanshteyn, 76, has high blood pressure.

Rubin fears the heat in the couple's eighth-floor apartment has caused their conditions to deteriorate.

"They're older people, they're scared," Rubin said. "They're afraid if they complain they'll be kicked out. My parents have me, but there are so many seniors in the building that have nobody."

Polina Dimanshteyn said that during the worst of the heat wave, she and her husband slept at Rubin's house because their apartment was unbearable, but some of her neighbors don't have such options.

Some have ridden the bus for hours on end just to get air conditioning, Rubin said.

The Problem Solver called HUD and the company that owns the building, Kopley Group.

Nick Kopley, owner of Kopley Group, said he has seen the petition but doesn't understand the residents' complaints.

The air conditioning system is old but it is working, he said. He said his company has employees and an HVAC contractor in the building every day, and none have reported the types of problems alleged in the petition.

"I can get 70 people to sign a petition for anything," Kopley said. "I just have to deal with what I can deal with. The system is operational. It's working."

Kopley said he has ordered an entirely new air-conditioning system for the building, but installation has been delayed by logistical issues.

He needs a permit for the crane that will lift the cooling unit to the roof, he said. In addition, he won't schedule the work until he knows temperatures will be manageable, because replacing the system will require the 152-unit building to be without air conditioning for at least 24 hours, he said.

The new system was ordered not because the current one is failing, Kopley said, but because repairing the current system is costly — some of the parts are outdated.

On Wednesday, Kopley challenged the Problem Solver to visit the building to see how the current system was working.

On Thursday afternoon, the Problem Solver visited several units, including the Dimanshteyns' apartment. Several residents said temperatures improved vastly Wednesday night, and remained lower Thursday.

In midafternoon, when the official temperature in Chicago was 89 degrees, the thermometer in the Dimanshteyns' apartment read 78 degrees.

Kopley said later that he had an engineer use an electronic thermostat to take readings in the hallways and units, and that the temperature was "at or near 73 degrees throughout the building."

"It's fine," Kopley said. "I think it's within the parameters of where it's got to be."

Although the building is cooled by a central unit, residents pay their own electric bills, he said. Each apartment has a control knob that allows residents to turn their air conditioning off, or to low, medium or high. He theorized that some residents simply don't turn their control knob to high.

Residents interviewed by the Problem Solver disagreed, saying they've had their air going full blast but it hasn't helped.